Digital video capabilities can be incorporated into a wide range of devices, including digital televisions, digital direct broadcast systems, wireless broadcast systems, personal digital assistants (PDAs), laptop or desktop computers, digital cameras, digital recording devices, digital media players, video gaming devices, video game consoles, cellular or satellite radio telephones, video teleconferencing devices, and the like. Digital video devices implement video coding techniques, such as those described in the standards defined by ITU-T H.261, ISO/IEC MPEG-1 Visual, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, ITU-T H.263 or ITU-T H.264/MPEG-4, Part 10, Advanced Video Coding (AVC) (also referred to simply as H.264/AVC or H.264), the upcoming High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, and extensions of such standards, to transmit and receive digital video information more efficiently.
Efforts have been made to develop new video coding standards based on H.264/AVC. One such standard is the scalable video coding (SVC) standard, which is the scalable extension to H.264/AVC. Another standard is multi-view video coding (MVC), which is the multiview extension to H.264/AVC. A joint draft of MVC is described in JVT-AD007, “Editors' draft revision to ITU-T Rec. H.264|ISO/IEC 14496-10 Advanced Video Coding,” 30th JVT meeting, Geneva, Switzerland, January-February 2008, available at http://wftp3.itu.int/av-arch/jvt-site/2009—01_Geneva/JVT-AD007.
Video compression techniques perform spatial prediction and/or temporal prediction to reduce or remove redundancy inherent in video sequences. For block-based video coding, a video frame or slice may be partitioned into macroblocks. Each macroblock can be further partitioned. Macroblocks in an intra-coded (I) frame or slice are encoded using spatial prediction with respect to neighboring macroblocks. Macroblocks in an inter-coded (P or B) frame or slice may use spatial prediction with respect to neighboring macroblocks in the same frame or slice or temporal prediction with respect to other reference frames.